Searching of electronic files during the discovery phase of a litigation is becoming increasingly expensive and time consuming. Typically, litigation parties (e.g., plaintiffs and/or defendants) will serve their opponents with a request for production of documents. The request will almost always define documents to include electronic forms of communications, principally e-mails. For example, the request may inform the litigation opponent that they have 30 days to produce any and all materials including but not limited to written documents, e-mail communications and computer databases which address, describe, reference, or in any way relate to “Subject A”.
The obligation of the requested party is no longer confined to a search of a filing cabinet, but rather an entire computer system. Often times too, the discovery request is served on an entire company, not just an individual. For large companies, this task can be enormous, even for reasonably drafted discovery requests. The obligation to search can extend to hundreds of servers, desk top computers, back up tapes, etc., all within a relatively short time frame.
This problem is exacerbated when the e-mails contain attachments, as they often do. Frequently, an e-mail can have very little relevant content but their associated attachments may contain voluminous amounts of data.
Electronic discovery software programs have been designed to parse electronic files, such as e-mails, into various data fields and transpose this data in to associated fields of a record in a searchable database. In that way, key word or other electronic searches can be performed on the electronic files to retrieve relevant data. However, prior art electronic discovery programs do not provide a convenient way to link e-mail files with their associated attachment files within the searchable databases. This means that an electronic search of each attachment file must be done separately from an electronic search of its associated e-mail file.
Accordingly, even with prior art electronic search programs, the burden of searching all e-mails and their attachments can be cumbersome and expensive. This is especially the case, when most of the relevant information is spread over several associated attachments to an e-mail.